Cambridge Digital Library

Waterloo

It has been a damned serious
business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned
nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.

The Duke of Wellington, 19 June 1815, quoted by Thomas
Creevey

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, ten
miles south of Brussels in what was then the Kingdom of the
Netherlands. It was the climactic engagement of a campaign that
pitted an invading French army under Napoleon Bonaparte against a
combined force of Allied troops—chiefly British, Netherlandish and
Hanoverian—commanded by the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army
led by Gebhard von Blücher. The French were routed, and the
warfare that had plagued Europe for more than two decades was
definitively ended: there were to be no hostilities on such a scale
on the continent until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
Through its impact on the politics and power-relationships of a
Europe approaching the height of its worldwide influence, the
outcome of Waterloo remains significant to this day.

After the French Revolution of 1789, Europe had been embroiled
in twenty-five years of near-continuous war. Early attempts to
subdue revolutionary France gave way to a series of conflicts in
which successive coalitions of European powers struggled to deal
with the expansionist ambitions of Napoleon, Emperor of the French
from 1804. Following the failure of his invasion of Russia in 1812,
Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 left France
itself vulnerable. Unable to force his enemies back, the Emperor
abdicated in April 1814 and went into exile on the Mediterranean
island of Elba. But late in February 1815, in a characteristic
high-stakes gamble, Napoleon sailed for France at the head of a
thousand soldiers. In just twenty-three days, he returned to Paris
and took back the crown.

Russia, Austria, Prussia, Britain and their allies formed a new
coalition, pledging to put vast armies in the field to force
Napoleon from his throne. Napoleon realised that his best chance
lay in striking decisively before weight of numbers could be
brought to bear, and resolved to engage enemy forces garrisoned in
the Netherlands. 128,000 strong, the French Armée du Nord crossed
the frontier on 15 June. After two smaller engagements on 16 June,
battle was joined at Waterloo on 18 June.

On both sides, objectives were simple. Napoleon sought to break
the Allied resistance before the Prussians could arrive on the
field. Wellington sought to hold ground and bleed the enemy of
precious troops. Much of the Prussian army was marching towards
Napoleon’s right flank. The battle at Waterloo was, as Wellington
said the next day, ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’
. At five o’clock the Prussians were threatening French positions
at Plancenoit. Around six o’clock, with the fall of Wellington’s
central strongpoint, the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, the French
were winning. But two hours later, after the failure of Napoleon’s
final assault, the Duke was able to order a general advance against
a suddenly demoralised enemy: the French army broke and was driven
from the field. The Coalition armies pursued Napoleon into France,
and he abdicated for a final time on 22 June.

The battle’s importance was fully recognised by the generations
which came after it. From the very first moment after the fighting
stopped, soldiers and civilians alike wanted to put their
experiences and emotions into words. The direct, first-hand
writings of those involved in the battle were complemented by the
works of literary authors. Both Byron and Tennyson described the
battle as an ‘earthquake’, and Victor Hugo called it ‘the hinge of
the nineteenth century’: ‘On that day, the perspective of the human
race was changed’. For the British, Waterloo established a place in
the national imagination by which it seemed to underwrite the
country’s advance to global pre-eminence as the century progressed.
Given the widespread fascination with the battle, Waterloo soon
became a fashionable destination for travellers: many wanted to be ‘
an eye-witness of the very spot’ where history had been made.

The human cost of the Waterloo campaign for those who fought in
it is impossible to quantify accurately, but the combined
casualties of the campaign have been tentatively estimated at over
100,000 men killed, wounded and missing (including deserters).
Large numbers of the wounded on both sides at Waterloo remained
untreated until the days following the battle, and many died after
protracted suffering. The vast majority of those killed in the
battle were buried or burned on the field.

For the commanding officers, Waterloo had very different
outcomes. Blücher was 72 at the time of the battle: having been
raised to the rank of Prince after the peace of 1814, he returned
to his estate in Silesia and died there in 1819. Wellington, after
serving as Commander-in-Chief of the Allied occupation force in
France, went into politics and was briefly Prime Minister from 1828
to 1830. He died in 1852, the quintessential British hero to many,
although a symbol of political regression to others. It is Napoleon’
s reputation around which most controversy still clings. Exiled to
St Helena, he died and was buried there in 1821, but his remains
were repatriated to France in 1840 and entombed in splendour at Les
Invalides in Paris. Yet appreciation of his qualities as a military
commander cannot erase his despotism and warmongering as a
statesman: ‘the enemy and disturber of the world’, as his
adversaries styled him. Lord Acton’s famous judgement on power and
corruption may be applied to Napoleon Bonaparte with particular
force: ‘Great men are almost always bad men’.

Although Cambridge University Library has never set out to
assemble a specific, single collection relating to Waterloo, the
strength and breadth of our accessioning activity mean that over
the course of two hundred years we have amassed a rich and
fascinating variety of written records, maps and book arts relating
to the battle and the era in which it played so significant a part.
To mark the bicentenary of Waterloo, this Digital Library
collection presents a sample of such material, encompassing
military drill-books, manuscript letters, hand-coloured engravings,
battlefield plans, printed mementos and tourist reminiscences.

An interactive BBC video of the making of the Waterloo
collection, including detailed descriptions of some of the more
important items, can be seen here.

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